Word: manhattanization
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...Lancaster, the preeminent actor-producer in a decade when that meant a lot, at first had no thought of appearing in the film. Then, during one casting conference, he said, "What about me?" He, like Curtis and Odets, was a New York boy; Manhattan had been his boot camp, and the dialogue - spit with verbs - "came out of his mouth," Buford writes, "like his own words punched black and blue." He was also the producer and, according to Curtis "wanted to direct that movie." He challenged Mackendrick during the shooting and planned to fire him before the film was edited...
...film will soon reveal what sort of a big brother he is. Under the opening credits, Elmer Bernstein score blares confidently (though in truth it sounds like leavings from his terrific work on "The Man With the Golden Arm" two years before). The glimpses of midtown midnight Manhattan under the credits put me in mind of a Henry Hook cryptic crossword-puzzle clue - "shining silver trash" - for which the answer is "aglitter" (silver = AG; trash = litter); the movie gleams like a diamond trying to pass itself off as a rhinestone. A truck dumps a pack of newspapers in front...
...Ralph Blumenthal writes in "Stork Club: America's Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society." Unlike a quarter of all adult Americans in the Depression, these madcap heiresses and showbiz Romeos had a job: to be seen being glamorous, by sitting in Manhattan night clubs that served as the fraternities of the leisure class, an Ellis Island for the elite. There the swells would sip martinis, intone the odd witticism or inanity and occasionally commit some headline indiscretion. It was all frightfully decadent, and frightfully innocent...
...Sweet Smell" has to be seen as well as heard, and the place to do that right now is at Manhattan's Film Forum, where a splendid new 35mm print is unspooling through March 28. The big screen and clear print lets you see the pockmarks on J.J.'s skin (the harsh lighting that cinematographer James Wong Howe threw on Lancaster makes him look by turns reptilian and leprous), allows you to read the small print on the cover of a scandal magazine called Sensation (the lead story: "Sex in the City"). But the picture looks good in any size...
...soul to confide to us. But he has a handsome line of patter - a slick pitch (most likely a spitter) for shoddy merchandise. He stops you on the street, talks fast, and suddenly you're wearing a fake Rolex. You've been had, in the grimy mid-Manhattan theme park called Sidneyland...